1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, a method, and a computer-readable medium for seeking one or more representative images in an image set.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of information storage techniques, the storage capacity of storage devices is improved day by day, and the amount of information stored in the storage devices becomes larger and larger. In actual life, for example, in an image set such as an electronic photo album including a lot of electronic images, there are many images that are not organized in general; as a result, it is difficult for a user to quickly grasp the overall content of the image set. In this case, if it is possible to automatically seek out one or more images that can mostly represent the contents of all the images in the image set (i.e. the so-called representative images), then user experience may be dramatically improved.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,978 discloses a navigation system for a document image database. With regard to a search term input by a user, the navigation system collects one or more images by carrying out text retrieval, then automatically groups the images by employing sense-of-vision features of the images, and then displays representative images of the respective groups.
In US Patent Application No. 2007/0094251, automated rich presentation of a semantic topic is described. The semantic topic may be one or more keywords, personal names, events, scenes, or the like.